Metaverse Forecasts

The Metaverse Roadmap met this past weekend in San Francisco but I was unable to attend do to a few reasons.  A few of my friends made the event and said it was fantastic and there was some excellent break-out meetings that covered a broad range of topics.

Mark Wallace over at 3pointD.com put together a few forecasts of the Metaverse through 2010 (take each with a grain of salt):

• Government regulators will require real-world ID information from people wanting to create an account in online games.
• We’ll see a decline in business travel as a result of virtual world business applications.
• Current AOL users will discover Second Life; current Second Life users will leave Second Life.
• Anshe Chung will earn $1 million in Second Life.

For those of you who do not know of the Metaverse Roadmap, here is their mission statement from their website:

Taking its name from the immersive virtual world imagined by Neal Stephenson in his visionary novel, Snow Crash, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.

Tags:  Metaverse Roadmap, virtual world, and Web 2.0